Re: Interesting Paper on Climate Change Science

[Ron Wormus]

Nick ,
There is no question that warming is occurring now. Only if such temp excursions have also occurred in the recent past. I think that article makes a good case that Mann cooked the books and that NO due diligence was ever done on his work. It was just blindly accepted .."Nature" where it was published included. This is not good science. I think the data in question was from a sample of 4 trees and then he used a erroneous statistical method to bias the data...and what's more he did it intentionally because he did his graphs without the data and did not disclose it. Hardly above board as it should be. Full disclosure of data and methods are a prerequisite to good science. Especially when billion $ decisions are being made based on the data.

You are correct ."Hype" is too strong a word in my email but it is too bad when the scientists fudge the data to prove their pre existing bias.
Ron

--On Thursday, October 13, 2005 11:44 AM +0100 Nick Palmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

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> Sorry, but this article that R. Wormus refers to is just
> one straw man argument after another. R. Wormus himself
> goes too far in his email "This is a really interesting
> article describing the origins of much of the climate
> change hype" No, it doesn't describe the origins of the
> "hype" at all. Serious concerns that humans can affect
> the climate, though their activities, predate the "hockey
> stick" graph by a long way. The fact that it has been
> used politically (quote "The whole field of global
> warming is currently suffering from the fact that it has
> become politicized") is regrettable if it turns out to
> have been massaged, consciously or unconsciously. The
> authors do actually make out a reasonable case that Mann
> (responsible for the tree ring/ice core analysis that led
> to the graph) used a dubious method by statistically
> overweighting the growth spurt of Californian bristle
> cone pines in the 20th century to infer an accelerating
> increase of global temperature. The article itself
> states that this increase was probably due to the
> increase in levels of CO2 in that time - no-one appears
> to be disputing that CO2 levels are increasing -and not
> to a temperature increase.
>
> From the article :- A referee of their work stated
> "McIntyre and McKitrick present a cogent analysis of the
> global warming data.They do not conclude that global
> warming is not a problem; they don't even conclude that
> the medieval warm period really was there.All they do is
> correct the analysis of prior workers."
>
> and also -: McIntyre:" Our research does not say that
> the earth?s atmosphere is not getting warmer. But the
> evidence from this famous study does not allow us to draw
> any conclusions about its extent, relative to the past
> thousand years, which remains as much a mystery now as it
> was before Mann?s article in 1998"
>
> Readers of Vortex will remember that my position has
> always been that, although I will always attack global
> warming deniers, because they are the most dangerous, my
> secondary position is that I will also attack those who
> purport that climate science is good enough to accurately
> predict the future. They are also dangerous! Vanity is
> present on both sides of the argument. This means that if
> the Kyoto protocol predicts a 2 degree rise in 50 years,
> I will say bollocks! The whole nub of the global warming
> (or climate change, as I prefer to describe it) argument
> should be that if we continue to alter the composition of
> the atmosphere by pouring known greenhouse gases into it
> faster than natural processes sequester it, then basic
> physics says that the climate dynamics will change. The
> predictive science of the effects of feedback, positive
> and negative, such as increased cloud cover, methane
> clathrate release, increased atmospheric water vapour,
> decreased albedo etc has not been experimentally
> verified, only computer modelled. Evidence from the far
> past show that Earth has had many pseudo stable climate
> states. Some of them may be better for us than the one we
> currently have, if we could choose which one we end up
> with, but I don't think there are many who would say that
> the transition periods between stable states was ever a
> comfortable time - in fact such climate "flips" appear to
> be associated with mass species extinctions. I don't
> think humans should risk setting off one of those. Earth
> can do these climate flips all by itself with natural
> variations in influences. It just seems insane to force
> one to happen by our own actions.
>
> Nick Palmer
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